Lost text in 1 Chronicles 11
In 1 Chronicles 11:13, you’ll notice we’ve added a significant translator insertion. Why is that?
It appears a portion of the original Hebrew manuscript was lost long ago, even before the Greek Septuagint was translated in the ~3rd century BC. This isn’t uncommon for ancient texts!
You see, the context makes this very clear. Of the ‘three mighty men’ — JeseBaAl, EliEzer, and Shammah — only the first two are actually named in the traditional text. What’s more, the latter part of EliEzer’s famous deed is missing, and the beginning of Shammah’s famous deed is gone too!
How do we know this? We have a parallel account in 2 Samuel 23. So, we’ve carefully filled in the missing information by taking it from that other Bible book, placing the inserted text [inside square brackets].
Experts in Hebrew confirm that about three lines of Hebrew text were lost in antiquity. A loss like this could only have happened very early on, when the Jewish population was still quite small, and there were very few copies of Chronicles available for comparison.
It seems later scribes didn’t realize material was missing. Consequently, they merged the two famous deeds of EliEzer and Shammah together, creating a hybrid account that was entirely ascribed to EliEzer.
Poor Shammah got erased! Thankfully for Shammah — and for us — the parallel account in 2 Samuel lets us know what truly happened. Perhaps one day, an ancient text will be found that contains the original wording.
You can read more about this issue at BibleHub in the Keil and Delitzsch Old Testament Commentary.
Also, be sure to check out these translator notes for more insights: